Northern Vanuatu as a Pacific Crossroads: The Archaeology of Discovery, Interaction, and the Emergence of the ‘‘Ethnographic Present’’ STUART BEDFORD AND MATTHEW SPRIGGS introduction Northern Vanuatu (Fig. 1) is located in a strategic region of the Western Pa- cific, to the south of the Solomons, north of New Caledonia and west of Fiji and Polynesia. It may have acted as a crossroads between these other archipelagoes from the time of initial human colonization some 3000 years ago and through the succeeding millennia. The authors are currently directing an Australian Re- search Council–funded project that addresses research issues associated with initial human colonization and subsequent cultural transformations in the region. It focuses on inter-archipelagic interactions1 with island groups to the north and east—primarily the Solomon Islands and Fiji—and their role in the development of the oft-remarked-upon cultural diversity of northern Vanuatu. There is broad unity at one level in language and in the institution of grade-taking, raising of full-circle tusker pigs, and the use of kava, but at the same time a considerable diversity in the manifestations of all these phenomena and in particular in the number of languages, in the plastic arts, and in the detail of social structure and architecture (Bonnemaison et al. 1996). The accounts of the early European explorers and later works by pioneering anthropologists have in many respects shaped the perceptions, constructs, and context that continue to influence contemporary researchers in Pacific Studies, including archaeologists (Clark 2003). Pioneering anthropologists in Vanuatu such as Deacon (1934) and Layard (1942) both explained northern Vanuatu cul- tural diversity as resulting from four separate migrations, the last introducing the graded society. Although multiple migrations as an explanation for the distribu- tion of particular cultural traits or trait complexes has very much gone out of intellectual fashion since then, what has replaced it is either an over-generalized appeal to local innovation to explain all cultural di¤erences since initial settle- Stuart Bedford is Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University; Matthew Spriggs is Professor in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian Na- tional University. Asian Perspectives,Vol.47,No.1( 2008 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Fig. 1. The northern and central parts of Vanuatu, showing traditional exchange ‘‘roads’’ as recon- structed from ethnohistory. Links to the south of Epi Island and those involving the Torres Islands are not shown. Jom is a type of shell money produced on the island of Malo, and nambas are penis wrappers. Map adapted from Hu¤man (1996). bedford and spriggs . northern vanuatu as a pacific crossroads 97 ment, or a retreat from any theorization of diversity at all. We believe that it is time to return again to serious consideration of this diversity and the theoretical arguments that have been used to explain it. Modern archaeology began in the Pacific in the late 1940s and it was quickly demonstrated that there was considerable time depth associated with human oc- cupation of the Western Pacific, well beyond that considered by these early the- orists (Kirch 2000). It is now realized that the ‘‘ethnographic present’’ contains a whole series of cultural snapshots which may or may not be associated with any great time depth, and which have been heavily transformed by European contact (Spriggs 2005). Archaeological research over the last five decades has established that human colonization of Island Melanesia (defined as the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia) began in excess of 40,000 years ago (Lea- vesley and Chappell 2004; Spriggs 1997a) and during the Pleistocene probably progressed as far as the end of the main Solomons chain along a series of intervisi- ble islands forming what is often called Near Oceania (Green 1991). Further movement eastward out into Remote Oceania, a region with substantially larger water gaps separating often-smaller islands, did not begin until just over 3000 years ago. Once human settlement beyond the main Solomons did occur it appears to have been very rapid, with people of the Lapita culture colonizing eastward through the Southeast Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji as far as Tonga and Samoa over a period of only a few hundred years (Kirch 1997; Spriggs 1997a). Their proximate origin was in the Bismarck Archipelago where a melding of disparate cultural elements had taken place to form the Lapita cultural complex (Green 2000; Spriggs 2003). The reign of Lapita however, at least as an archaeologically distinct horizon defined by its dentate-decorated pottery, was relatively short-lived. It has been demonstrated that in Remote Oceania it generally lasted only 200–300 years (Anderson and Clark 1999; Bedford 2003; Burley et al. 1999; Sand 1997). It is from about 2700 years ago that clear divergence in the archaeological record begins, suggesting a contraction or specialization of exchange, an increasing focus on local adaptation, sociopolitical transformation, and possibly secondary migra- tions by groups with a quite di¤erent cultural background (Spriggs 1997a :152– 161). However, despite the fact that the period after Lapita through to the present represents 90 percent of the human history of western Remote Oceania, this time span remains, with a handful of exceptions, poorly defined and under-researched archaeologically in Island Melanesia beyond the Bismarck Archipelago (Kirch 2000:117–164; Walter and Sheppard 2006:137–144). Considerable e¤ort has been invested in tracing the historical development of exchange systems, communicative networks, and the dynamics of cultural change in Near Oceania and in Fiji and West and East Polynesia, but there remains a large and crucial under-researched gap in northern Vanuatu in western Remote Oceania, and an equally significant one in the more southeasterly parts of the main Solomons chain in Near Oceania. Fundamental research questions that can be addressed in the northern Vanuatu area through archaeological methods include the timing and scale of cultural di- versification, and the dynamics and nature of culture change. Two elementary 98 asian perspectives . 47(1) . spring 2008 and certainly interrelated drivers have led to the ethnographic me´lange in the re- gion: innovation on the one hand, and acquisition through interaction, contact- induced change, or direct migration on the other. It is the interplay of these that the project has sought to address, rather than assuming one of them as the domi- nant process. There is empirical archaeological evidence, from initial Lapita settlement through to the recent past that attests to phases of inter-archipelagic interaction in western Remote Oceania. At the beginning of the current project, evidence associated with Vanuatu included pottery on Santo, Malo, and Erromango brought from New Caledonia (Dickinson 2001) and obsidian from the Bismarck Archipelago found on Malo in the Lapita period (Ambrose 1976). Later periods of interaction are evidenced by Banks Islands obsidian found in Fiji (Best 1987), and in Tikopia (Kirch and Yen 1982), and the Reefs–Santa Cruz Group in the South- east Solomons (Ambrose 1976). A range of materials from the main Solomons and even farther north was imported across the Remote Oceania barrier into the Southeast Solomons in the Lapita and post-Lapita eras and may well have also reached Vanuatu (Green and Kirch 1997). For decades archaeologists have postu- lated similarities in the ceramics and other material culture of Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia, the Solomons, and New Guinea (Golson 1961; Green 1963; Spriggs 1997a, 2004). Despite its strategic location and high research potential much of northern Vanuatu remains an archaeological terra incognita and the confirmation or other- wise of inter-archipelago interaction, its chronology, influence, and intensity re- main largely unresearched. The most detailed archaeology that has been carried out was undertaken by Ward (1979) on the small islet of Pakea in the Banks Islands. Several researchers have worked on Lapita sites on Malo (Hedrick n.d.; Hedrick and Shutler 1969; Galipaud 1998a; Noury 1998; Pineda and Galipaud 1998) and more recently on Aore, Tutuba, and Mafea (Galipaud 2001; Galipaud and Swete-Kelly 2005; Galipaud and Vienne 2005). Galipaud has also carried out a series of surveys and excavations on Santo, primarily on the west coast and in the Torres and Banks Islands (Galipaud 1996a, 1996b, 1998b). Further surface surveys are documented in unpublished reports by the Vanuatu Cultural and Historic Sites Survey (VCHSS). initial research hypotheses At the start of the project we developed a series of primary interrelated hypoth- eses to be tested. They were as follows: 1. Northern Vanuatu was a major stepping-stone during the initial human colonization and settlement of Remote Oceania Over the last few decades of research an increasingly robust theoretical framework and associated database outlining the chronology, spread, and socioeconomic na- ture of Lapita have begun to emerge. Conventionally it has been argued that there was a clinal west-east pattern of settlement with accompanying ‘‘distance decay’’ in ceramics (Kirch 1997), although more recently this pattern has been challenged with some authors arguing for the potential of multiple origins for bedford and spriggs . northern vanuatu as a pacific crossroads 99 particular Lapita communities (Burley and Dickinson 2001; Clark and Anderson 2001). Debate continues to rage over a whole spectrum of issues associated with Lapita archaeology, in part because of very patchy distributional data for archipel- agoes such as the Solomons and Vanuatu. Lying southeast of the Reefs–Santa Cruz Group with Tikopia and Vanikoro in between and 800 km west of Fiji, northern Vanuatu provided both an easy target and subsequent safety net for initial colonizers as they moved out from the main Solomons chain into the previously unexplored areas of the Pacific (Irwin 1992).